….bringing what you want and need….

Main menu

Monthly Archives: July 2014

Post navigation

Former Chelsea striker Didier Drogba has completed a transfer deal from Galatasaray FC to his former club, Chelsea.
The 36-year-old first moved to Stamford Bridge in
2004 for £24m and helped the Premier League side win their first ever Champions League in 2012.
According to the Cote d’Ivoire striker, Chelsea boss, Jose Mourinho offers to bring him back to the club and he accepted the offer.
“It was an easy decision – I couldn’t turn down the
opportunity to work with Jose again,” he said.
“Everyone knows the special relationship I have with this club and it has always felt like home to me.
“My desire to win is still the same and I look forward to the opportunity to help this team. I am excited for this next chapter of my career.” – Drogba said on Instagram

Say you step off a train in a new city and need to get to your hotel, about a mile away. Most taxi drivers don’t want to take people such a short distance. But with your luggage, it’s too far to walk.

Someday, there may be a third option: Urban transit systems built around small electric vehicles, or pods, that drive themselves.

Supporters of these driverless pods say they take up less space than cars, cut down on urban noise and produce zero emissions. And they offer more flexibility: Instead of relying on a set schedule, riders can summon these pods for private, individual trips.

Since 2011, a fleet of such pods has been transporting passengers between terminals at London’s Heathrow Airport, eliminating more than 50,000 bus trips a year on crowded nearby roads. The Heathrow system runs mostly on elevated tracks.

Now, Milton Keynes, a small city 45 miles northwest of London, wants to be the first in the world to put a network of pods on pedestrian walkways. The vehicles would connect the city’s train station with its downtown shopping district a mile away.

Riders can reserve pods using their smartphones. Or they will find a fleet of pods waiting for them outside the railway station or other popular spots, said Geoff Snelson, director of strategy for Milton Keynes Council.

Early designs show a small, stubby vehicle with two seats and a large, plunging windshield. Anticipating unease with driverless vehicles, the project’s backers want the pods to look sleek, modern and unthreatening.

British engineering firm RDM Group is working on three prototype pods fitted with autonomous-driving systems from Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group. To start, they’ll have a steering wheel, an accelerator, a brake and a human driver, although future models are expected to be fully autonomous.

Packed with cameras and sensors, the pods will know when to turn and brake to avoid collisions with pedestrians, cyclists or teens on skateboards.

“The focus has to be on safety,” said Neil Fulton with Transport Systems Catapult, a British public transit advocacy group.

The city plans to begin testing the two-seater pods in the spring, with the hope of gradually integrating larger models into its transit system by the end of 2015. Other municipalities worldwide are watching Milton Keynes’ plans with an eye on adopting similar systems. But first, laws must be drawn up to allow driverless cars on roads in the UK.

“There’s huge interest in this,” said Fulton. “We’re trying a completely new mode of transport.”

The last we saw of Captain Jack Sparrow, he was on a beach with ol’ scallywag Gibbs, reflecting on his decision to deny himself the Fountain of Youth. “Who’s to say I won’t live forever [anyway], eh?,” he says. Indeed.

Despite some delays—and a Lone Ranger-sized hiccup—the long-awaited next chapter in the “Pirates” franchise, following 2011′s “On Stranger Tides,” has a new official release date: July 7, 2017.

Common sen$e dictated that there needed to be another film, even though the fourth film was hardly the best-regarded of Capt. Jack’s adventures. Still, it grossed more than $1 billion around the world. A fifth film, at one point titled “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” was initially targeted for a 2015 release, with Kon-Tiki directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg taking over for Rob Marshall (who in turn had taken over for Gore Verbinski.)

But last summer, shortly after “The Lone Ranger” had put a $190 million dent in Disney’s bottom line, the project was delayed, due to budgetary concerns and an unfinished script. Now, Disney is recalibrating Sparrow’s course for 2017.